When
an unclean spirit comes out of a man it wanders over the deserts seeking
a resting place, and finds none. Then it says, I will go back
to the home I left. So it returns and finds the house unoccupied,
swept clean and tidy. Off it goes and collects seven other spirits more
wicked than itself, and they all come in and settle down; and in the
end the mans plight is worse than before. That is how it will
be with this wicked generation. (Matthew 12: 43-45)

This saying of Jesus is a good way
to describe how American society in the present generation has been
infected with political correctness. The first, unclean spirit,
was the spirit of racial segregation in the South. This was a system
of racial supremacy created in the bitterness of the southern defeat
in the U.S. civil war and the ensuing Reconstructionist era. Denying
the dignity of black people, its kind of society maintained a system
of legal segregation in which the white race held the advantage.The
Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s swept this house clean.
White racial supremacy was discredited and defeated.

But then the empty house
of American political culture was filled with the spirit of political
correctness, manifested not just with respect to race but to gender,
ethnicity, sexual preference, and other birth-determined characteristics,
with the result that American society and culture became sharply fragmented,
turning against itself. A new kind of prejudice developed. A new spirit
of hatred and intolerance, directed against the supposed hatred and
intolerance of a society dominated by white males, came to settle upon
the land. It was a spirit, worse than the previous one, which insisted
that the rights of free thought and free speech be denied all who disagreed
with its ideological prescriptions.

Why was this spirit worse? To my way
of thinking, evil masquerading as good is worse than evil admitting
to be that way. The racial intolerance exhibited by segregationist society
in the south was the demon of white supremacy of ignorant rural and
small-town peoples. Its natural, though damaging, to think of
ones own group as being superior. But that is past. The new demon
of political correctness, in contrast, is an intolerance of educated
persons who view themselves as being socially and morally superior to
others. Such intolerance is worse as it affects not only those individuals
who freely choose it for themselves but others forced to accept its
point of view.

This is a culture of forced belief
born not so much of white guilt, as it is commonly alleged,
but of white fear of blacks rioting in the streets, of cultural elites
shouting in unison to silence all who disagree with their views, and
of the power structure punishing offenders against the prescribed norms.
It is a disease of the spirit, getting inside peoples minds and
hearts and, by its unwanted intrusion, undermining their sense of personal
self-identity.